Repertory Selected for Maximum Impact

Los Angeles Philharmonic Comes to Lincoln Center

It should be chiseled above the doors of every symphony hall: What an orchestra plays matters as much as how it plays, if not more so.

By that measure a strong case can be made that the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which is coming to Avery Fisher Hall on March 27 and 28, is the most important orchestra in the country. Its programming spends a daring amount of time in the modern and contemporary repertories.

The Philharmonic’s programs at Lincoln Center, conducted by its charismatic music director, Gustavo Dudamel, set classics of the early 20th century by Debussy (“La Mer,” 1903-5) and Stravinsky (the complete “Firebird,” 1909-10) alongside two more recent works. Preceding the Debussy and Stravinsky on March 28 is Claude Vivier’s “Zipangu,” from 1980, which sends a string chamber ensemble through a gamut of textures, from shimmery translucence to dense intensity.

The March 27 concert is given over to John Adams’s capacious, seething “Gospel According to the Other Mary,” a take on a Bach-style Passion, which the Philharmonic presented in the work’s premiere in Los Angeles last year. It arrives in New York in a newly staged version directed by Peter Sellars, the co-librettist and Mr. Adams’s regular collaborator.

Photo

Gustavo Dudamel, the music director.Credit
Katy Winn/Associated Press

Its score showed the composer finding new possibilities within his distinctive style. And the staging retains last year’s marvelous central trio of singers: the mezzo-sopranos Kelley O’Connor and Tamara Mumford and the tenor Russell Thomas. Mr. Adams’s “Gospel” is not the tightest evening, but it is often mesmerizing.

The work is also an example of the Philharmonic’s recent ambitions to lay claim to music drama in addition to the symphonic repertory. With the Los Angeles Opera floundering, the orchestra has swooped in with a schedule of staged and concert performances that should be the envy of every American opera company.

It is already the envy of every American orchestra. The Philharmonic’s tradition of innovation began with the conductor Otto Klemperer in 1930s and continued through the decades-long reign of the administrator Ernest Fleischmann and its exhilarating years under Esa-Pekka Salonen, its music director from 1992 to 2009.

The orchestra’s 10-year-old Walt Disney Concert Hall is a model for 21st-century music spaces that was guided into existence by its tireless, fearless executive director, Deborah Borda. At 32 Mr. Dudamel adroitly balances building his experience in the standard repertory with expanding his and his orchestra’s horizons.

Their New York visit reminds us that in 2013 every orchestra requires a welcoming home and the ambitions to match it.

A version of this article appears in print on February 24, 2013, on page AR15 of the New York edition with the headline: Repertory Selected For Maximum Impact. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe